Week 3 Video 9: The rules for giving: When does giving enhance happiness and success?

What are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life?
This is surely one of life’s biggest questions, and a question that has interested many of our ancestors. Buddha famously gave up his kingdom in search of happiness. Several Greek philosophers (from Aristotle to Epicurus and Plato to Socrates) had their own views on what it takes to be happy. And of course, we all have our own theories about happiness too.
How valid are our theories?
Until recently, if you wished for an answer to this question, you would've been forced to base it on discussions with spiritual leaders. Or, if you were lucky, you could've based it on late-night (and perhaps intoxicant-fueled) conversations with friends and family. Happily, all that has changed now. Over the past decade-and-a-half, scientists have gotten into the act big time. We now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
This course, based on the award-winning class offered both at the Indian School of Business and at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, developed by Prof. Raj Raghunathan (aka "Dr. Happy-smarts") draws content from a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral decision theory to offer a tested and practical recipe for leading a life of happiness and fulfillment.
Although not mandatory, reading Prof. Raj's forthcoming book, titled If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? can help you review and assimilate the material covered in this book at your leisure.
For Coursera learners alone, the hardcover version of the book is available for a deep discount of 50%, plus shipping and handling. You can order the hardcover for 50% off by writing to Aaron at: Aaron@800ceoread.com. Please mention that you are a student of the "coursera happiness course" in your email.
The course will feature guest appearances by several well-known thought leaders, including:
- Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational and, soon to be released, Irrationally Yours),
- Ed Diener (“Dr. Happiness”),
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow),
By taking this course, you will discover the answers to questions such as:
- Why aren’t the smart-and-the-successful as happy as they could—or should—be
- What are the “7 Deadly Happiness Sins” that even the smart and the successful commit?, and
- What are the “7 Habits of the Highly Happy” and how can you implement them in your life?
By the end of the course, I expect students who have been diligent with the lectures and exercises to not just gain a deeper understanding of the science of happiness, but to also be significantly happier.

教学方

Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan

脚本

[MUSIC] [SOUND] [MUSIC] Terve and welcome back my Finnish and other friends. We've covered quite a bit of ground in the last few videos, so let me start by summarizing what we have discussed so far. As I mentioned a couple of videos back, there are three strategies to overcome neediness and avoidance, and become more balanced in relationship. The first is to practice self-compassion. Second is to express gratitude. And the final strategy is to practice kindness and generosity, and thereby, strengthen the need to love and give, a need that appears to be hardwired in us. In the last video, I discussed why being kind and generous makes us happy, and there appear to be a couple of reasons for this. First, we appear to be hardwired to be loving and giving, as I just mentioned, sometime back. So naturally, it makes us happy when we are kind and generous. Second, we feel more competent and capable when we are generous, as we saw in an earlier video. And that's another reason why being generous makes us happy. A third reason is that others appreciate it more when we are kind and generous. And so, we benefit from their reciprocity of generosity, which makes us not just happy, but also successful, as Adam Grant and his colleagues have found across a variety of studies. This brings me to the main point I want to make in this video. Although being kind and generous is likely to boost your happiness levels in general, it may not always do so. It turns out that being indiscriminately generous, bred by your not including yourself in your generosity, can actually backfire and lower your chances of success and also make you depressed. So it's important to understand when, how, to whom, and to what extent to be generous. This topic can get quite intricate and complex, as you might be able to imagine, so we are really lucky to have someone who is very knowledgeable about it. His name is Reb Rebele. He's a writer, speaker, educator, and an applied positive psychology expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Reb collaborates a lot with Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, who I've already mentioned a few times in this course. I asked Reb to explain to us when generosity enhances happiness and success, and when it doesn't. Before answering this question, I asked Reb to also give us a little bit of a background knowledge that will help us better understand the findings from this area. So, you're first going to hear Reb talk about reciprocity styles, and the three different types of people, givers, takers, and matchers. He'll explain what reciprocity stylers and what these three categories meanâ. And then, he'll get into when generosity leads to success and happiness, and when not. Listen. >> Adam Grant, a researcher at the Wharton School. He's really interested in the question of what drives people to succeed. And in particular, how does the way that we interact with other people affect our prospects for success? And he came up with this term called reciprocity style. So what he defines reciprocity styles is, how you tend to interact with other people on a day-to-day basis. And most of us, at least in certain domains of life, tend to fall into one of three major types of styles. So you can be a giver, which is that, when I interact with you, if I'm a giver, then what's going on in my mind is thinking about, what do I have to offer? How can I give something to you? On the flip side, if I'm a taker, if I have a taker reciprocity style, then my mindset is, what do you have to offer me? In our interaction, in our relationship, in our exchange, what can I get from you in the pursuit of my goals, and in the pursuit of what I'm aiming for? And then the third bucket, which is actually what most people are most of the time, is a matcher, which is that we interact with people in a way where we seek equity and justice and fairness. And so, if you do something nice for me, I'm going to be inclined to want to do something nice back to you. If I do something nice for you, I'm going to expect that you would do something nice back for me. And so the question is, which of these three reciprocity styles tends to be most conducive to success, particularly in the workplace, is where he's studying it. And what he found across a range of different professions, medicine, engineering, sales, lots of different contexts, is that maybe, somewhat surprisingly, givers are disproportionately represented at the top. So it's not the classic story that it's sort of the person who fights and claws their ways, and just sort of takes advantage of everybody else who gets to the top. But it's the people who are spending additional time, giving resources to other people who end up with the best grades in med school, the most sales, the most technical, engineering drawings. So givers are ending up at the top of the success ladder. Takers and matchers, while they certainly can get there, the givers are more likely to end up at that spot. And the sort of working theory or hypothesis about why that is, is that givers are able to harness a lot of extra resources, even unintentionally because of the goodwill that they've built up in other people who are willing to then help them out in return. So if I'm going about figuring out how I could offer my services to other people, if those people are matchers themselves, they're in turn, even if I didn't want them to, going to be inclined to speak highly of me, to recommend me to their colleagues, to help me out when I need a hand. And so this reputational information, and this is particularly salient in today's day and age, where social media and the increased connectivity that we have in the workplace today, means that our reputation gets around much faster than it used to. So, if you do good things for people, word's going to get around. Likewise, if you do wrong by people, word's going to get around and that can sacrifice the sort of taker's path to success. The catch though is that when Adam looked at the bottom of the success ladder in all of these different professions, he also found givers to be more likely to end up there. So, the giver is sort of divided and some of them ended up at the top of the success ladder and some of them ended up at the bottom. So, there's this paradox where some people who are really kind and compassionate and caring and helpful, are able to do that in a way that's conducive to their own success. And others who do that are sort of self-sacrificing and ending up burning themselves out and giving up their own opportunities. What we find in our research and our work with lots of organizations is that the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful givers primarily comes down to their ability to attend to not just the needs of others, but the needs of themselves. So in a sense, you can think about it as they include themselves in the people that they have to give to at least some of the time. So Adam talks about this as being otherish. So instead of being selfless or selfish, the successful giver is what he calls otherish, in that they're primarily oriented toward helping other people. But they attend to their own needs, their own need to recharge, their own goals that they care about as well. And I would say sort of two main strategies there that particularly draw on. One is that they contain the cost of their giving. So instead of giving to anyone, anytime, in any way, with anything that they ask for, the successful givers have filters. So they say, how much is this going to take? Am I the right person? Can I introduce you to somebody else who would be a better resource for you, a more efficient resource for you? And they say, where am I best able to apply my energy for maximal results, without burning myself out? So they contain those costs. They do things like find four or five people who need help with the same thing and help them at the same time, instead of just taking each person one on one. And then the second major bucket is that they do what we call sort of value extending strategies. So they take the way that they're going to help one person, and figure out how to extend that value to multiple people, including themselves. So for starters, they allow themselves to feel gratitude and pride and other positive emotions when they do good for others, because they know that that's going to recharge them. They take time to say no at times when they're going to need to because that's going to give them more energy, more resources to be able to help more people down the line. Sort of a long answer, but the gist is that givers have these great pathways, especially in today's hyper connected age, to be both sort of good, kind, caring person, and achieve their own goals, but they need to attend to how they're doing it so that they don't burn themselves out in the process. >> So as you just heard selfless giving is not good for success. You're likely to burn out if you're totally selfless and indiscriminate in your giving. The most successful givers turn out to be what the researchers call otherish givers, givers who include themselves in the acts of generosity. What are some of the strategies that otherish givers use? As you just heard from Reb, they seem to use two strategies in particular. They contain the cost of giving. For example, they find four to five people who need help at the same time and help them all, rather than helping them separately. Second, the exercise value enhancing strategies. They feel grateful and proud. I'm sure this is authentic proud as opposed to hubristic proud, which energizes them to give more. In addition to these rules, I could add a couple of more. First, increase the chances that you can actually see the impact of your generosity. This is obviously important if you think of one of the big reasons why being kind and generous makes you happy, namely, that it makes you feel competent and capable. Therefore, you are likely to feel happier when you can actually see the effects of your giving, because seeing that is going to make you feel more competent and capable. Second, have fun in the act of being generous. Just because you're being a do-gooder doesn't mean that you can't also have fun in the process. This rule is of course is quite consistent with the second strategy, the value enhancing strategy that Reb mentioned, where you feel grateful or proud for being generous. Having fun while you're giving, I've discovered from my own personal experiences, as well as from the experiences of my students, is less likely to burn you out. With that, let me bid you [FOREIGN] till the next video, in which I will be giving you the instructions for something that I call, the creative altruism exercise, which is the third exercise for this course. [MUSIC]